Social media updates and new features to know this week
Including Meta, TikTok, Instagram and more.
Welcome to a new week of updates. Meta is facing a lawsuit from the Consumer Federation of America, which claims the company allowed scam ads to spread across Facebook and Instagram and profited from them.
The lawsuit argues Meta knowingly let the ads continue despite publicly saying it was cracking down. Internal reports cited in the case suggest scam-related ads may have accounted for around 10% of Meta’s revenue, raising questions about whether the company had a financial incentive to look the other way.
The complaint also says Meta misled users about how safe its platforms actually are, creating what it calls a “false impression of safety.” In response, Meta said the claims don’t reflect reality and pointed to its enforcement efforts, including removing millions of scam ads and accounts.
Here’s what else is new.
Meta
Meta is giving parents more visibility into how teens are using AI.
The company added a new Insights tab inside its supervision tools on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger that shows the topics teens have asked Meta AI in a week. This includes categories like school, entertainment and health, plus subtopics, like fitness or mental health. Importantly, parents don’t see full transcripts, just the themes, which Meta says is a balance between awareness and teen privacy.
Meta also recently launched Meta Account, with one login and one control center for Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Meta AI and even its smart glasses.
The day-to-day experience won’t change much for users, but behind the scenes, everything from passwords to security settings and devices will be managed in one place, Meta says.
Additionally, Meta is expanding its AI business assistant beyond a limited beta into a global tool, making it usable in more markets and languages.
The assistant, which lives inside tools like Ads Manager and Meta Business Suite, is now launching across the U.S., EMEA, APAC and Latin America with local language support, so advertisers can interact with it in their native language.
Businesses can use it to get campaign recommendations, troubleshoot issues and see optimization insights in one place.
Instagram says key metrics for creators are now “front and center,” on the app, with added insights like engagement rate, to help users better understand how their content is actually performing beyond likes, shares and impressions.
This update is about giving creators a clearer, more actionable view of performance, rather than just more data, the app makers say. They also said they’re trying to make analytics easier to interpret without digging through multiple tabs or dashboards.
Instagram is also getting a new standalone photo tool called Instants. It’s designed for users to take photos directly in the app (so no uploads from camera roll), and those images can be shared with any followers, but will then disappear after a short window and are only viewable once. Kind of like Snapchat, but disappearing more quickly.
LinkedIn has a new tool called Crosscheck, which will turn the platform into a testing ground for AI models, Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s chief product officer, said.
Crosscheck lets users enter a prompt and get two different answers from competing AI systems, without showing which model wrote each one. Users pick the better response first, then LinkedIn reveals the source, or what the company calls a “blind taste test” for AI.
Over time, those choices feed into leaderboards that rank model performance by job, industry and use case, creating a kind of real-world scoring system for AI quality.
LinkedIn is also testing a new filter called “Has Verifications” that lets users sort comments to only see posts from people or pages with verified identities.
It’s a way to surface more credible voices in crowded comment sections and make it easier to sort, the app makers said.
TikTok
TikTok is adding a new option that lets creators manually suggest or block keywords tied to their videos’ metadata, helping the platform better understand what a clip is actually about.
Instead of relying only on captions, hashtags or AI detection, creators can now guide TikTok by flagging relevant terms or excluding ones that don’t fit, Social Media Today reports.
X
X is testing a major change called Custom Timelines, per Nikita Bier, X’s head of product. This let users pin topics they care about, like specific interests, and see a feed just for that topic instead of one main timeline.
It will be powered by Grok and tailored to each user, based on what they already engage with. For now, it’s only available to Premium users on iOS, Bier said.
X has also officially launched X Chat, a separate messaging app that pulls direct messages out of the main platform and gives them their own dedicated space.
The app focuses on private conversations, with features like encrypted messaging, PIN protection and a cleaner, ad-free chat experience.
Note: There’s some skepticism around those privacy claims, The Verge reports. While X says messages are end-to-end encrypted, researchers have flagged potential flaws in how that encryption works.
Courtney Blackann is a communications reporter. Connect with her on LinkedIn or email her at [email protected].
